Part 4 (1/2)

”Help me, Robie,” she said. ”I want my mother.”

”h.e.l.lo, youngster,” Robie said. ”What would you like? Comics? Candy?”

”Where is she, Robie? Take me to her.”

”Balloons? Would you like to watch me blow up a balloon?”

The little girl began to cry. The sound triggered off another of Robie's novelty circuits, a service feature that had brought in a lot of favorable publicity.

”Is something wrong?” he asked. ”Are you in trouble? Are you lost?”

”Yes, Robie. Take me to my mother.”

”Stay right here,” Robie said rea.s.suringly, ”and don't be frightened. I will call a policeman.” He whistled shrilly, twice.

Time pa.s.sed. Robie whistled again. The windows flared and roared. The little girl begged. ”Take me away, Robie,” and jumped onto a little step in his hoopskirt.

”Give me a dime,” Robie said.

The little girl found one in her pocket and put it in his claws.

”Your weight,” Robie said, ”is fifty-four and one-half pounds.”

”Have you seen my daughter, have you seen her?” a woman was crying somewhere. ”I left her watching that thing while I stepped inside-Rita!”

”Robie helped me,” the little girl began babbling at her. ”He knew I was lost. He even called the police, but they didn't come. He weighed me, too. Didn't you, Robie?”

But Robie had gone off to peddle Poppy Pop to the members of a rescue squad which had just come around the corner, more robotlike in their asbestos suits than he in his metal skin.

WITHOUT A THOUGHT.

by Fred Saberhagen.

The machine-as-adversary is an eternal and powerful theme of much science fiction. Fred Saberhagen, a soft-spoken man from Chicago, has tackled this theme in a highly popular series of recent stories about the ”berserkers”-colossal machines left over from some ancient galactic war, still roaming the universe and bringing grief to earthmen venturing into s.p.a.ce. In a dozen or more stories Saberhagen has developed a brilliant picture of men at war with the ma.s.sive berserkers, seeking to outwit them on their own terms and destroy them. The present story was one of the earliest in the series.

Fred Saberhagen is a former electronics technician whose background includes four years of Air Force service. Now he is a professional writer with some two dozen published stories and several books to his credit. Though he keeps his killer instinct well hidden behind a facade of mild-mannered reserve, he is an expert in karate and other sinister forms of self-defense.

The machine was a vast fortress, containing no life, set by its long-dead masters to destroy anything that lived. It and many others like it were the inheritance of Earth from some war fought between unknown interstellar empires, in some time that could hardly be connected with any Earthly calendar.

One such machine could hang over a planet colonized by men and in two days pound the surface into a lifeless cloud of dust and steam, a hundred miles deep. This particular machine had already done just that.

It used no predictable tactics in its dedicated, unconscious war against life. The ancient, unknown gamesmen had built it as a random factor, to be loosed in the enemy's territory to do what damage it might. Men thought its plan of battle was chosen by the random disintegrations of atoms in a block of some long-lived isotope buried deep inside it, and so was not even in theory predictable by opposing brains, human or electronic.

Men called it a berserker.

Del Murray, sometime computer specialist, had called it other names than that; but right now he was too busy to waste breath, as he moved in staggering lunges around the little cabin of his one-man fighter, plugging in replacement units for equipment damaged by the last near-miss of a berserker missile. An animal resembling a large dog with an ape's forelegs moved around the cabin too, carrying in its nearly human hands a supply of emergency sealing patches. The cabin air was full of haze. Wherever movement of the haze showed a leak to an unpressurized part of the hull, the dog-ape moved to apply a patch.

”h.e.l.lo, Foxglove!” the man shouted, hoping that his radio was again in working order.

”h.e.l.lo, Murray, this is Foxglove,” said a sudden loud voice in the cabin. ”How far did you get?”

Del was too weary to show much relief that his communications were open again. ”I'll let you know in a minute. At least it's stopped shooting at me for a while. Move, Newton.” The alien animal, pet and ally, called an aiyan, moved away from the man's feet and kept single-mindedly looking for leaks.

After another minute's work Del could strap his body into the deep-cus.h.i.+oned command chair again, with some-thing like an operational panel before him. That last near-miss had sprayed the whole cabin with fine penetrating splinters. It was remarkable that man and aiyan had come through unwounded.

His radar working again, Del could say: ”I'm about ninety miles out from it, Foxglove. On the opposite side from you.” His present position was the one he had been trying to achieve since the battle had begun.

The two Earth s.h.i.+ps and the berserkers were half a light year from the nearest sun. The berserker could not leap out of normal s.p.a.ce, toward the defenseless colonies on the planets of that sun, while the two s.h.i.+ps stayed close to it. There were only two men aboard Foxglove. They had more machinery working for them than did Del, but both manned s.h.i.+ps were mites compared to their opponent.

Del's radar showed him an ancient ruin of metal, not much smaller in cross section than New Jersey. Men had blown holes in it the size of Manhattan Island, and melted puddles of slag as big as lakes upon its surface.

But the berserker's power was still enormous. So far no man had fought it and survived. Now, it could squash Del's little s.h.i.+p like a mosquito; it was wasting its unpredictable subtlety on him. Yet there was a special taste of terror in the very indifference of it. Men could never frighten this enemy, as it frightened them.

Earthmen's tactics, worked out from bitter experience against other berserkers, called for a simultaneous attack by three s.h.i.+ps. Foxglove and Murray made two. A third was supposedly on the way, but still about eight hours distant, moving at C-plus velocity, outside of normal s.p.a.ce. Until it arrived, Foxglove and Murray must hold the berserker at bay, while it brooded unguessable schemes.

It might attack either s.h.i.+p at any moment, or it might seek to disengage. It might wait hours for them to make the first move-though it would certainly fight if the men attacked it. It had learned the language of Earth's s.p.a.cemen-it might try to talk with them. But always, ultimately it would seek to destroy them and every other living thing it met. That was the basic command given it by the ancient warlords.

A thousand years ago, it would easily have swept s.h.i.+ps of the type that now opposed it from its path, whether they carried fusion missiles or not. Now, it was in some electrical way conscious of its own weakening by acc.u.mulated damage. And perhaps in long centuries of fighting its way across the galaxy it had learned to be wary.

Now, quite suddenly, Del's detectors showed force fields forming in behind his s.h.i.+p. Like the encircling arms of a huge bear they blocked his path away from the enemy. He waited for some deadly blow, with his hand trembling over the red b.u.t.ton that would salvo his atomic missiles at the berserker-but if he attacked alone, or even with Foxglove, the infernal machine would parry their missiles, crush their s.h.i.+ps, and go on to destroy another helpless planet. Three s.h.i.+ps were needed to attack. The red firing b.u.t.ton was now only a last desperate resort.

Del was reporting the force field to Foxglove when he felt the first hint in his mind of another attack.

”Newton!” he called sharply, leaving the radio connection with Foxglove open. They would hear and understand what was going to happen.

The aiyan bounded instantly from its combat couch to stand before Del as if hypnotized, all attention riveted on the man. Del had sometimes bragged: ”Show Newton a drawing of different-colored lights, convince him it represents a particular control panel, and he'll push b.u.t.tons or whatever you tell him, until the real panel matches the drawing.”

But no aiyan had the human ability to learn and to create on an abstract level; which was why Del was now going to put Newton in command of his s.h.i.+p.

He switched off the s.h.i.+p's computers-they were going to be as useless as his own brain under the attack he felt gathering-and said to Newton: ”Situation Zombie.”

The animal responded instantly as it had been trained, seizing Del's hands with firm insistence and dragging them one at a time down beside the command chair to where the fetters had been installed.

Hard experience had taught men something about the berserkers' mind weapon, although its principles of operation were still unknown. It was slow in its onslaught, and its effects could not be steadily maintained for more than about two hours, after which a berserker was evidently forced to turn it off for an equal time. But while in effect, it robbed any human or electronic brain of the ability to plan or to predict-and left it unconscious of its own incapacity.

It seemed to Del that all this had happened before, maybe more than once. Newton, that funny fellow, had gone too far with his pranks; he had abandoned the little boxes of colored beads that were his favorite toys, and was moving the controls around at the lighted panel. Unwilling to share the fun with Del, he had tied the man to his chair somehow. Such behavior was really intolerable, especially when there was supposed to be a battle in progress. Del tried to pull his hands free, and called to Newton.

Newton whined earnestly, and stayed at the panel.

”Newt, you dog, come lemme loose. I know what I have to say: Four score and seven . . . hey, Newt, where're your toys? Lemme see your pretty beads.” There were hundreds of tiny boxes of varicolored beads, leftover trade goods that Newton loved to sort out and handle. Del peered around the cabin, chuckling a little at his own cleverness. He would get Newton distracted by the beads, and then ... the vague idea faded into other crackbrained grotesqueries.